Navigating Cumulative Disadvantages of Migration, Care, and Employment Regimes: Dependent Immigrants in Canada

In their journal article, Navigating Cumulative Disadvantages of Migration, Care, and Employment Regimes: Dependent Immigrants in Canada, Yukiko Tanaka and Cynthia Cranford investigate the ways in migration, care, and employment policies create multiple disadvantages for immigrants in Canada. The researchers apply gender and class lenses to analyze not only the disadvantages produced by these regimes, but also the ways in which immigrants navigate them.

Cynthia Cranford is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and is a CGSP affiliate faculty member.

Citation

Tanaka, Y., & Cranford, C. J. (2024). Navigating cumulative disadvantages of migration, care, and employment regimes: Dependent immigrants in Canada. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxae024

Abstract

This article uses interviews with dependent immigrant women and men in Canada to analyze immigrant disadvantage in the labor market and workplace. Synthesizing feminist social policy scholarship with sociological studies of gender, work, and migration, we develop a framework for analyzing how migration, care, and employment regimes intersect to generate disadvantages. We find that gendered disadvantages embedded in dependent migration policies accumulate through a family-market care regime and a racialized, precarious employment regime. Both women and men dependent immigrants are disadvantaged in the labor market and workplace through multiple, accumulating dynamics; yet we also find different degrees and pathways to disadvantage, and multiple strategies to navigate it, shaped by gender and class. We argue that analyzing both the structure of inequalities produced by intersecting regimes and the ways people navigate them over time is key to understanding the contradictory mechanisms that both produce disadvantage and provide openings for strategic maneuvering.